Re: [HACKERS] Contributing

> > What is the ideal setup to have when contributing to PG development?
> AFAIK, the main advantage of CVSup is that you have a complete copy of
> the CVS archive on your own machine, which means you can examine cvs
> commit log messages, pull old versions, and so forth without having
> to contact hub.org. If you just use "cvs update" periodically then
> you only have the current sources, and have to use remote cvs to do
> things like checking log messages.

The other principle advantage to CVSup is its efficiency in bringing
over updates. It is very fast and really minimizes the bandwidth.

> If you've got the disk space to spare for the full archives, and have
> a fairly slow link to hub.org, then a local archive is worthwhile.

Or find that hub.org disappears occasionally, or...

> I am not sure of the implications of trying to commit into your own
> copy of the archive when you are using CVSup. I would think that
> the commits might get lost at next CVSup run ... can anyone who uses
> CVSup clarify?

CVSup guarantees that the parts of your cvs tree which are in common
with the server are the same. So it is probably not such a good idea
to use it to replicate a checked-out tree if you plan on making any
changes, because it will wipe them out on the next update. It does
allow you to make branches in your local repository, but I don't use
this feature.

> cvs update is pretty good about merging changes from the repository
> into files that you have changed locally. Dunno how well that works
> with CVSup. Probably you have to do a local "cvs update" into your
> working files after each CVSup run, and the net result on the work
> files is just the same.

Yes. As you can tell, I'm a big fan of CVSup...

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu
South Pasadena, California